


In the Hollow Chambers of My Heart

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Doctor Who, Alternate Universe - Edge of Tomorrow, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 10:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3286895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nineteen years ago, SHIELD scientist Leo Fitz accidentally caused an alien invasion, losing his life in the process. Now, as a last-ditch effort to salvage the Earth, SHIELD sends Jemma Simmons into the past to find Fitz and help him undo the events leading to the apocalypse. Each time she fails, she gets pulled back to her time and sent in again. She must watch him die, over and over, before they can both live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Hollow Chambers of My Heart

What exactly was the Hydra?

The Greeks believed it to be the monster of all monsters, the guardian of the Underworld, a creature with many heads and few enemies, for there were no effective weapons fashioned against it.

Civilizations came and went, ideas were conjured and buried, and after a while the Hydra ended up in children’s books, its vile tales of destruction half-mumbled by jaded parents in the piss-yellow nightlight.

And then thousands of those serpent-like creatures, through a rip in the fabric of spacetime, crossed a parallel universe to ours. All around the world, Hydras descended from the sky and spread death with just the air they breathed.

Helpless as they were, what remained of the human population allowed the Greek Gods to weave their way into life again. The survivors lived in fear on the western end of the North America landmass, under the protection of SHIELD, an organization whose backbone – ironically enough – was science.

Quite frankly Jemma Simmons found this whole regression business a bit insulting to the great minds of days long past. Why she was downing her third beer and listening to Skye’s alcohol-tainted stories, however, was a bit beyond her.

“– I’m telling you, he piloted his ship smack dab into a black hole and left a gigantic gash on the spacetime fabric. On his first trip!” Skye exclaimed, slamming her hand on the table for emphasis.

“So you’re saying that the Hydra invasion was caused by a scientist test-driving his spaceship?” Simmons arched an eyebrow.

“He called it the TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimension In Space,” Skye said. “The guy was a genius, I’ll give you that, but he was mad. Who the hell dives headfirst into the unknown? No wonder it was a one-way voyage.”

Simmons shook her head and made a non-committal noise, “I’m tipsy, and you’re full of crap. Let’s go home.” She slipped a twenty under the glass. “Besides, suppose you were telling the truth, it would never make sense that he died; brilliance is meant to survive.”

—————————-

Commander Melinda May tossed the files to Simmons, photographs and paper yellowed at the edges sliding across the metallic desk. “Read them, Agent Simmons,” she ordered.

Simmons obliged. Silence stretched from one moment to the next, accentuated only by the fluttering of pages and the ancient AC unit’s tired groan; it was rumored that SHIELD’s budget was cut short after Hydras crawled all over DC and left their toxic trail on the White House’s front yard.

“It can’t be,” Simmons finally looked up. “It is just an urban legend, the story of a boy and his ship.”

“SHIELD is humanity’s last hope against Hydras. Do you think people would take it kindly if they found out a SHIELD scientist brought on the apocalypse itself?” asked May. Her stoic expression was even more solemn in the pale white light, and Simmons shifted in her plastic chair. “We promise protection, and we shall deliver – ” there was a thoughtful pause “ – whatever the means. The world may never know that nineteen years ago, Agent Leopold Fitz destroyed the universe.”

Simmons said nothing, just traced the photo in her hand. He was so young, boyish, even, but his eyes were so bright it hurt.

 _Of course he died_ , she sighed. _Of course_. Boys with fire for a heart were always burned before they could see the world alight.

“Now that you’ve got the background info,” May spoke at last, “report to Director Coulson’s office at 0900 tomorrow. You will be briefed on your next mission,” she hesitated, “and possibly SHIELD’s last.”

For the first time in her professional career, May sounded sad.

—————————-

Project Indigo was SHIELD’s last-ditch effort before their funding was scrapped for good, and as an agent, Simmons should be steadfast in her trust when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner headed the project with a small nation’s GDP as their budget.

Instead, all she had was an overwhelming sense of dread.

Really, teleportation by sending her scattered atoms into the time vortex to be reassembled nineteen years earlier inside a spaceship, trying to stop a scientist from accidentally ripping a hole in the universe, what could _possibly_ go wrong?

Still, Director Coulson green-lit Project Indigo. With the human population dwindling down to mere eighty-three million and Hydras slithering everywhere on Earth, the only feasible solution to the problem was to prevent the problem from happening in the first place. It wasn’t a bad idea, exactly, just a great idea with bad possibilities, and at this point Coulson was willing to try anything.

“Remember, you have ten minutes to change Fitz’s mind before the TARDIS passes the event horizon. Ten minutes. That’s all we can give you, because that’s the farthest Stark can trace the ship’s signal. As soon as you enter the black hole’s gravitational field, we will pull you back and send you in again, until his decision is un-made,” Coulson instructed as Simmons struggled to get the strap of her backpack-shaped vortex manipulator on. “Any last questions before we start?”

“Yes sir,” she said. “I failed my field assessments. Twice. I’m just a biochemist. Why me?”

Coulson squeezed her shoulder, a fatherly gesture, and whispered to her ears alone, “because you’re a terrible liar, and he’s a seeker of Truth.”

It was an unexpected answer, rather more Romantic than Ancient Greek, but she supposed it would have to do. Keep all her atoms ruminating for the rest of eternity inside the time vortex if things went south, at least. She pressed her lips into a tight smile and gave Stark the go-ahead signal. Then everything blurred to a gentle black.

———————————

By some miracle, it worked.

There was a humming sound from somewhere, and Simmons followed it, her heart a wild horse galloping in her chest. It took her a long time to navigate her way out of this labyrinth of corridors that she woke up to. Exactly how big was this spaceship, anyway?

He stood with his back to her in where she guessed was the console room, flipping levers and pressing buttons with his slender hands. His posture was hunched; for a moment he looked even smaller than what the files depicted.

Just a little boy in way over his head.

The grating creaked under her boots. He turned, meeting her nervous gaze, and she saw, in that fleeting second before he registered reality, that she was wrong. Here was a man imprisoned behind rosy cheeks and smooth face soft at the edges. There was no giddiness that came with taking your first spaceship out for a spin. There was only desolation.

She wondered why.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he asked. He looked surprised, yes, but his voice was even, consonants and vowels shaped in a tone that was distinctly Scottish.

She swallowed and counted her heartbeat; she never did perform well under pressure. _One. Two. Three. Here goes_. “I’m Agent Jemma Simmons, with SHIELD,” she stopped to flash him her badge. “It is imperative that you trust me, for your life, and that of the human race, hinge on this mo-”

The timer on her wrist beeped, four zeros flashing a startling red. The ship accelerated on its own volition.

“Oh bloody hell,” she muttered, and all her atoms were sucked back into the time vortex.

—————————————

“I need a blueprint of the TARDIS,” she snapped, as soon as she felt herself whole again.

Coulson’s mouth opened and closed, a ‘how did it go’ stuck in his throat. He gestured toward the archive, and May took off with a curt nod. Simmons mumbled something about cryptic bureaucratic bullshit and unnecessarily big ships.

As Banner monitored her vital signs, she pored over the blueprints, memorizing each turn, each room, until the TARDIS’s layout was all but scorched across her hippocampus.

She knew she had to run the moment she was onboard.

——————————-

She found him in the console room with six minutes to spare, sitting in the jump seat with his feet perked on the control panel.

There it was again, that haunted look.

He rose with a start when she approached, her badge already in hand, “you need to change course, Agent Fitz. Head away from that black hole.”

And she went on with ragged breath, still high from the run, about a useless death, an unintended apocalypse, a planet plagued with monsters. She took time to paint an abhorrent picture of the future, and he listened in complete silence.

When she was done, she glanced at her timer. He followed her eyes.

Thirty seconds left.

Was that enough time for him to steer the TARDIS away?

He lifted her hand, the one with red numbers falling slowly back to zero, and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, his warm breath on her skin like a caress. Then he flopped down to his seat.

She watched in utter horror as the ship lunged past the invisible line separating life and death.

————————————

Light flooded, and Simmons’ form solidified in mission control center. “Take me back! I was so close!” She screamed to anyone who would listen, but they all insisted the system took two hours to reboot, and it was past five anyway.

Still, she wanted to go back, pleas dissolving into commands dissolving into threats. It wasn’t until Banner patiently explained that her physiology couldn’t withstand direct exposure to the time vortex more than twice a day that she gruffly left the facility.

She was not particularly keen on being pulled apart and put together, nor was she hell-bent on wiping Hydras out of existence in one day. And she was definitely not so desperate to save the life of that scientist. No, not at all.

_Okay, maybe a little._

But she had her doubts about him and she needed to go back and confirm them. Frustrated, she rubbed her temples. SHIELD was withholding information regarding the TARDIS, and she needed to know more than what the meager files she had contained. If only the main archive was open for access…

—————————————

“Why do you think it’s called the TARDIS?” Simmons tapped her finger on the table idly. There was something unbearably sad about a café near closing time. Maybe it was the still vacancy where daytime vivacity should have been, and she hated it. Regardless, it was harder to track down Skye and her here, buying them more time for their activity that was a bit less than legal.

Skye looked up from her laptop. “Dunno. Sounds catchy, I guess,” she replied absentmindedly, her fingers too busy dancing across the keyboard.

“Time and relative dimension in space. But why? It’s not a time machine,” muttered Simmons, almost to herself. For a while all was quiet except for frantic typing.

“Who says it’s not?” Skye said at last. She spun the laptop around to Simmons, undeniable smugness in her expression; it wasn’t a common occasion that the Triskelion archive got hacked.

Simmons squinted at the screen. “A ship bigger on the inside that can go anywhere, anywhen?”

“Yup,” said Skye, popping the p. “Says here it’s also… sentient?”

“Sentient, sentient” Simmons repeated, toying the word on her tongue while the cogs in her brain turned a thousand cycles per minute. Something finally clicked, and her face paled. “Do you know what this means?”

Skye raised an eyebrow in place of a question.

“In case of emergency, the neural connection between the pilot and the ship can be activated.”

“Oh no…”

“He could’ve steered the ship away from that black hole using only his thought. Never mind thirty seconds, thirteen seconds were enough.”

“So he deliberately tore apart spacetime and caused an apocalypse?” Skye cried, and Simmons clamped a hand over her mouth, eyeing the barista warily.

Simmons heaved a sigh. “We don’t have concrete evidence yet.”

_No, you saw that look in him. You know for a fact it was his will all along._

_But why?_

“You know, Prometheus was an abomination in Zeus’ eyes, but a savior in humankind’s. It’s a matter of perspective, really.”

Skye gaped at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” Simmons dismissed. She never meant to say it aloud, but Skye didn’t seem to ponder on it much. “Now can you pull up the TARDIS’ travel log? Given his dexterity, I don’t believe he was only test-driving the ship.”

—————————————-

He jumped when she barged into the console room, no trace of recognition in his wide eyes, but this time she didn’t bother with introductions and silver badges and a future in ruins. “What did you see, Agent Fitz?” She blurted. “What did you see in the future that made you plunge into a black hole and bring Hydras to our universe?”

“What?” He blinked. “Who are you? How did you get here? What are you blabbering on about?”

“Don’t play games with me, Agent Fitz. You know what I mean.” She dug into her jacket and produced a flash drive. The scanner registered her fingerprint, and holographic words and images flickered into existence.

“The TARDIS’ travel log,” she said, scanning through a deluge of data and bringing up several files in particular. “The only authorized takeoffs are simple teleportation, and those are documented with great details. There were two other trips, both unauthorized. One was the last trip the TARDIS ever made, the trip it is making now: teleportation into Caldwell 35 galaxy, heading for the largest known supermassive black hole. The lack of records makes sense then,” she paused to gauge his reaction. He simply looked tired. “The other unauthorized takeoff – made five days before this one – involves time travel into the future. That was the only information the log has.”

“This is SHIELD’s most classified file. You’re not supposed to have access to it,” he frowned, reaching for the flash drive.

“There are some secrets that even SHIELD can’t keep.” She withdrew the drive and tucked it back in her jacket. Her badge caught the light of the console, silver gleaming a ghostly green, and he hesitantly stepped back. “I think level 10 operatives suspected your death, the damage to the spacetime fabric, and the subsequent Hydra invasion were intentional, that’s why the TARDIS’ specs and its travel log were never released to the rest of the organization. Nobody knows the incident ever existed, and those who do believe it to be an accident caused by you test-driving the ship and being a lousy pilot in general.”

At last, he exhaled. “Wow, they really believe that?” The jump seat groaned as he sank down onto it. “I’m wounded.”

“So you’re not denying anything,” she stated matter-of-factly.

“Neither am I confirming anything.”

“Look,” she took a step forward so that she was standing in front of him. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you did it out of malice,” her voice was soft, eyes tracing the contours of his childlike face.

He bit his bottom lip and dipped his head. “I have my reasons,” he mumbled.

“But SHIELD sent me into the past to stop you. Over and over again I get pulled apart and put together. Over and over again I watch you die. And now you say that you have your reasons, then I need to know what they are,” continued she, in a sharper tone now. “For nineteen years the Earth’s been Hydras’ playground. There will be another outbreak soon, and with the resources we have, we won’t be able to make it. We will most likely go extinct. Millions of years of evolution, thousands of years of civilization, they unfurl and dissipate like smoke, just like that. You die for your decision, but I have to live with the consequences. It’s only fair, Agent Fitz, that I get to know the truth. Now tell me, _what. did. you. see_?”

“You want answers?” He asked, and she nodded. “That may take a good long while.”

“You’ve got a time machine, haven’t you?” She quirked an eyebrow, removing the timer on her wrist and tossing it aside. It hit the grating and froze at the thirty-second mark. “And I’ve got all the time in the world.”

It was so ephemeral, the infinitesimal upturn of his lips, that it could be missed in a blink. But she didn’t blink, and in all those ten-minute lapses when all she saw in him was the storm-tossed sea, she had finally spotted the Pharos of Alexandria.

“Agent Jemma Simmons,” she stuck out her hand to him.

“Agent Leo Fitz,” he shook it once, nodded, and reeled the ship back from the black hole, into the time vortex.

———————————————-

There was a vessel the size of a London double-decker bus.

People piled inside, hundreds upon hundreds, each with a small suitcase in tow. A toddler tugged at his mother’s sleeves. She took out a stroller from her tiny carry-on bag and the child cheerily hopped in.

“Transcendental engineering,” Fitz answered Simmons’ unspoken question. They were leaning against the TARDIS’ doorframe, watching from a safe distance as the scene unfolded. “Same technology used for that vessel. The interior of a dimensionally transcendental object exists in another dimension altogether. Looks like it can carry eighty people, fits more than a million. It’s sort of like –”

“– Like the TARDIS,” she finished for him.

“Yeah.” A twinge of amusement made his lips twitch. “Four billion years of human ingenuity, they are bound to figure it out at some point.”

“Four billion years? As in four billion years into the future? The human race doesn’t go extinct after the Hydra invasion?”

He tucked his hands inside his pockets and rested one shoulder against the door. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you survived?” His gaze held hers with gentleness that appeared almost sad. “All those talk about global warming, stray asteroids, resource depletion, that so often we humans forget at the end of the day, life wills out. From the moment we were a single cell at the bottom of the ocean to the time we send Voyager 1 out of the solar system, five mass extinction events have happened. We have survived, and will survive, time and time again.”

Gesturing to the crowd that teemed with a chaotic vitality so distinctly _human_ , he continued, “this is the year four billion, and people are evacuating to a habitable planet before the Sun expands in another billion years. Planet Earth survived the Hydras. The only thing that kills it is the dying Sun, but even then, its children will live on amongst the stars.”

“So this future,” she suddenly said, nodding towards their surroundings, in a voice so even it masked the ragged emotion within, “was what you saw, and made you decide to tear apart the universe and bring Hydras to Earth?”

He simply nodded.

She stared at him in disbelief. There was a long pause, and she counted the flecks of silver in his blue eyes to calm the string of profanity wanting to break free. Why must those blessed with brilliance be cursed with madness?

“That still doesn’t explain why you did what you did,” she muttered at last, turning and marching away from him. There was an emergency temporal switch on her vortex manipulator that could transport her back to mission control center, and she desperately wanted to use it right now. This trial had failed, but do-overs were a luxury she could afford.

“Simmons, wait,” he caught her elbow and spun her around. “Please, you have to believe me.”

“Why _should_ I? You’re just a mad genius crazed with power, after all.”

The bile in her voice made him shrink back. He gulped, like he was swallowing the words he’d meant to say, and smiled sadly instead, “because I’m not done explaining.”

————————————-

The TARDIS materialized in a narrow alleyway, amidst rotting garbage’s stench that snaked around every corner, and yellowed posters plastered on bare brick walls. Simmons didn’t understand the language, but she knew they landed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. And judging by the heat, sometime during the summer.

Laughter shrilled all around them, and a group of skinny children chasing each other weaved past them in a heated game of tag. Fitz held out a hand to help one boy that had tripped and fallen get up. The boy dusted his pants, grinned at Fitz, and bounced off to join his friends along the cobblestoned sidewalk.

Simmons tried not to notice how Fitz gave a tight-lipped smile, how his eyes squinted against the sun, trapping light within. Instead, she asked, “isn’t meddling with the past strictly forbidden? Why did you help that boy?”

“See, that’s the biggest misconception of time travel,” said he, and the zealous conviction in his tone both frightened and enthralled her. “Almost everything that ever was or ever will be is in constant flux. Most of the time the timeline can correct itself.

“There are, however, fixed points in time: events that need to happen to ensure the proper progression of the timeline. The boy that ran away is Gavrilo Princip, the man who later assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand and indirectly starts World War I. I could help him when he fell down, but I must not – cannot – stop him from killing the Archduke. For better or for worse, it _has_ to happen.”

“What happened if you, say, went after him right now and locked him up inside the TARDIS for the rest of his life?”

“The Archduke wouldn’t die. The war would never happen. The timeline would fracture, and this reality would collapse. You and I, and everything we know, everything we love, will never come to be. The Hydra invasion –”

“– is a fixed point in time.”

“Yes,” he nodded, looking almost relieved at her realization. “That’s why I had to figure out a way to bring the Hydras to our universe. I know I will die, but the future we saw, Simmons, the migration, the technology, the planet that dies and another one that lives, all of it wouldn’t be there if those monsters hadn’t followed a rip in the fabric of spacetime here. It is our survival instinct that helps us advance, and we build four more billion years of civilization upon the destruction we’re left with. From blood and pain, Pegasus springs forth.”

The gravity of his words weighed on her. She looked at him, in the blazing sun of a mid-summer’s day, and the hope in his eyes seared a scar onto her chest.

He just so desperately wanted her to understand.

But she was Jemma Simmons, she grew up with the monsters on her doorstep, she slept with fitful dreams, and she couldn’t understand. So she lifted her hand and slapped him. Twice. Once, for the England she’d lost to distant memories. Once, for the tears soaked up in her childhood pillow.

“People like you,” she spat. “People who think they’re the heroes that die in a grandiose act of god, so often forget it is the rest of us who are faced with your aftermath. Ours the rubbles! Ours the nightmares! But you don’t know that because you are not fucking there!”

“You’re right,” he drew in a breath. “I’m not there.”

She answered him with cold silence. Past the jut of his shoulder was the rundown houses sloping over pale blue sky, the tangled and tapered streets filled with the cacophony of life hanging on the edge of society, and beyond that, the little boy whose bullet would soon make blood spill all over history pages. Her fists clenched without her knowing it.

Fitz leaned against a wall, hands behind his back, his eyes downcast. Long lashes brushed against his cheeks as he stared at the empty ground. Was this how Princess Cassandra looked when nobody believed Troy would soak up the blood of its own people?

_Damn you, Fitz. You should’ve put up a fight. Maybe then I wouldn’t have thrown away my armor._

“Okay,” she exhaled, resigned, and his head snapped up. “Prove to me that it’s worth it.”

“What?”

“All this bloodshed, all this desolation, it has to mean something in the grand scheme of the cosmos, yeah?” She asked. “One trip to the year four billion isn’t enough. Show me, Fitz, show me what we’re fighting for.”

There was a long pause, an eternity of waiting before every split-second decision, and she watched emotions flicker across his face. “Of course,” he conceded at last.

Together, they made their way back, and the TARDIS was there for them, beckoning.

—————————————

And so they went.

Down the river of time, their ship treading the water, they were like little kids plunging headfirst into the summer rain of gold and red.

He took her to the London of tomorrow, to the all-seeing Eye resurrected on top of rubbles, where the Thames flowed like time itself, just as easily, just as fast.

Life prevailed. She could sense it in the chilly touch of the wind, in the kind smile of passing strangers and the innocent gaze of a toddler in the park.

They spent the day walking down the street as casual observers of life through building windows. She saw tea with extra sugar, biscuit crumbs on the carpet, lazy Saturday mornings, groceries piled on the countertop. It was an ordinary life, and it was beautiful.

He touched her arm, and she realized she tasted salt on her lips.

“This could have been my London,” she said, her voice raspy.

“Yes, and this will be your children’s London,” he murmured. His thumb brushed along her elbow in a gesture of comfort.

There was in his words a quality akin to the temperate sun at dusk, and she suddenly yearned for someplace where the weather wasn’t so English.

He said he would take her to the Sahara Desert, but when the door swung open they were met with a plethora of green. He did a double take, checked the coordinates, and she grumbled about his atrocious driving skill, but her tone held a certain fondness that couldn’t be masked.

It turned out they were in the middle of the desert, after all. On the site of a project with the aim to terraform 20% of the Sahara and install solar panels on another 5%.

She marveled at the biodiversity of her surrounding while he marveled at her. Her fingers glided along the glabrous surface of an obcordate leaf, tracing its veins like she was trying to map out the world, and his eyes traced the upturn of her lips, watched as exhilaration and wonder flit across her soft features.

They stayed with the research team that night. During her conversation, she would occasionally look up to find him deeply engaged in a discussion with the engineers in charge of the solar program on the other side of the room, blueprints in his hands and fire in his cadence. The desert’s frigid nighttime bit and lashed, but somehow, she felt warm.

————————————

The next day, they attended the grand opening of the first commercial spaceport. Squinting against the sun, they watched as the spaceship tore apart the clouds and left its mark on the fabric of heaven. This was nearly two centuries after her time. She glanced at Fitz, who had gone to the edge of the universe on his own, and felt awe that was almost transcendental.

The feeling persisted, even when they went for lunch in a restaurant on top of Mount Everest.

“Is this a date, Agent Fitz?” she crooned playfully over her appetizer.

He nearly choked on his wine, and stammered out a ‘no’ that was halfway comprehensible, his cheeks a deep shade of pink. She thought it was actually quite endearing.

“Relax, I’m only joking,” she rolled her eyes, but clanked the spoon a little harder, and maybe – just maybe – there was a part of her that pouted.

In the evening they joined in the stream of people pouring into the tangled streets of Saigon to celebrate Tet Holiday. Little kids cheered on, gaping at the lion dance that moved seamlessly with the drumbeats. Spectators pushed forward, and he held her hand to keep her close. Later, when the exuberance of the crowd had dissipated, and the city that never slept finally went to bed, he still did not let go.

———————————————

When he landed them on a distant planet, she thought they were still on Earth. Neither of them expected to be on a base that was amongst the first wave of space colonization.

With the TARDIS, they sneaked into lab facilities at night and found out how humans succeeded at atmospheric conversion, how they turned sulfur-contaminated water into clean water, and how they created a self-sustaining greenhouse on barren terrain. He babbled on in reverence about increasingly complex engineering advancement, and she listened with half her mind on the specimen of local single-celled organisms on the shelf, until the alarm went off and they both realized they weren’t exactly discreet with their excitement.

“Run!” He yelled, as the guards came sprinting. They narrowly missed being Tasered, their shallow breaths punctuated by laughter once they were safely inside their ship.

She fell asleep that night dreaming of blue-eyed children building forts in the backyard.

——————————————-

They met the first female president completely by accident, because, as it turned out, Fitz was indeed a rubbish pilot. He missed a late twenty-second century European science conference by a hundred years and a continent.

They materialized in the middle of the Oval Office, when the President was neck-deep in paperwork. Instead of calling security though, she invited them to sit down, and they ended up talking for hours. She told them about the obstacles, the prejudices from the closed-minded few she faced when she rose to power, and the overwhelming support she had from everyone else. Simmons’ eyes were bright and gleaming as they listened. Now more than ever, she believed this future was worth it.

Before they left, he asked the President, “you do know beforehand that we are coming, don’t you?”

“I have access to SHIELD’s every single secret, dirty or otherwise. I shall leave the rest for you to figure out.”

They bad farewell, but the two scientists trod on an edge of uneasiness long after they had settled into the galley of the TARDIS for supper.

“Please tell me we didn’t create a paradox or something,” Simmons said as she pushed a piece of bread around on the plate, her appetite long gone.

“Highly doubtful,” he replied, putting his dish in the sink. “The way I see it, you return to SHIELD, write a detailed report about this trip, the world fights Hydras and wins, she becomes president of USA 2.0, reads your report, and knows when to expect us. End of story.”

“What about you? Where do you fit in to this future?”

She stared at him, waiting for an answer. He leaned onto the sink, his face hidden from view, but his shoulders slumped as he spoke, “I fit in a black hole.”

She didn’t know how to respond, so she stayed quiet and let the hum of their ship fill in the aching silence.

———————————————

“I hate the ocean,” he said one day, over the roar of waves and wind, their feet completely enveloped by the warm golden sand. This trip to a secluded twenty-third century beach wasn’t amongst many human achievements they had been seeing, but she figured it was a much needed break for the both of them. _Humans aren’t the only remarkable thing this Earth has, you know_ , she had said.

Perked on a rock, her eyes still trained on the pristine white foam racing towards shore, she asked him absentmindedly, “why?”

“Because it is too vast.” The waves lapped at his feet, and he kicked it, sending sand and water everywhere.

She laughed a little at his childlike act, “you can never push the sea away. The sea has a will of its own. It goes where it pleases. It trickles into every corner.”

“Much like you, I suppose,” he whispered, believing the waves would swallow his words with their persistent song. She heard him still, and hid her smile behind loose strands of hair set free by the land-bound wind. He reached out a tentative hand to tuck them back in place.

“You can never see where an ocean ends,” he picked up his half-finished explanation. “The horizon is only a product of our inherent limit. The actual ocean stretches on what seems like forever.”

“Is that why you hate it? Because it exposes a weakness in your design?”

“That sounds oddly theological for a scientist,” he smirked. She just shrugged. “But no. I hate the ocean because vast as it is, it is still but a fraction of this planet. And this planet is but a drop of water in the immense cosmic ocean. It reminds me just how small I am.”

The wind had picked up now. Rapid waves formed and lunged towards land, sprays of water like hippocampi drawing chariots eagerly leaping at the sky. She vaguely wondered how many life forms this sea had harbored, in the stillness beneath its raging surface, and how many more lives it had taken away to be forever entombed ninety feet below in its dark belly. She turned to face him, and the pensiveness weighing his lids down softened her expression. “You are unnerved by cosmic insignificance, and you build a time ship to explore the universe,” she said. “Fitz, you may occupy a miniscule space in the cosmos, but you matter. You matter so damn much. You are extraordinary.”

“You think so?”

She beamed at him, bumping her shoulder to his, and he blushed all shades of pink. Before them, the waves continued their shoreward waltz, incessant, infinite.

—————————————

Sometime toward the end of their second week travelling, their circadian rhythm went haywire after prolonged deprivation of day and night cues. He found her curled up on his jump seat in her PJs at around 3 a.m. GMT, reading one of the books on astrophysics he stacked in his library.

“You know, for all the space travel we do, I never actually get to see the stars,” she said when she heard him approach.

So he took her to an observation deck on a moon, part of the intergalactic theme park humans had built in their conquest of space, where they had a clear view of the Carina Nebula. The deck was closed, but that had never stopped them before. Spacetime traveler’s perk.

They exited an elevator, and right away she started running towards the edge of the deck. The deck itself was bathed in light from ionized gas, every color in the visible spectrum weaving into one another and stretching eternally from light year to light year. Colors soaked the blank space with their delighting burst of artistic endeavor, and stars sprayed across the canvas in their mesmerizing radiance. It was a humbling experience to have the universe and its infinite beauty bestowed upon her. To think she was a part of all this splendor… For the first time she was grateful to be alive.

“It’s funny,” she confided, blinking, trying to take such celestial and intoxicating brilliance in all at once. “Back on Earth people always conceptualize space as a dark fabric that cloaks all reality. A concealer of great secrets, if you will.”

He finally caught up with her, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, their hands gripping the railing. “But it is,” he objected, the corner of his mouth twitching a little. “A concealer of great secrets, I mean.”

She gave him a quizzical yet intrigued look.

“Look over there,” he pointed – his hand on her back to guide her to look in the right direction – to a pillar of dust and gas, golden at the edges, looming over the sapphire and violet cosmic background dotted with blinking lights. “That’s the Mystic Mountain, which gains its namesake from the shape of its formation, and its contrast again the blue swirls of oxygen emission.

“Nestled in between,” he continued, “are dark globules where nascent stars are born from atoms since the beginning of time. We are witnessing the rebirth of the universe. Isn’t that the greatest secret there is?”

His fingers traced constellations on her back, through the thin fabric of her PJs, and it was a pleasant kind of burning that scorched her skin. She leaned into his touch, humming quietly in response.

“And that bright red dot,” he began again, “is –”

“– Eta Carinae,” they spoke together.

“Yes,” his eyes twinkled with a smile. “The Greeks believed Phaeton accidentally created our galaxy when he lost control of his father’s chariot, and this may just be Helios’ teardrop as he wept for the death of his son. Its estimated mass is one hundred times more than that of our Sun. Once it goes supernova, or maybe even hypernova, its luminosity will light up our southern night sky for a while. And then its remains will go on to live in another star.”

“Or another you, another me,” she murmured, so softly like a flap of a butterfly’s wings brushing against his chest.

“Perhaps.”

And when she tugged him by the collar to bring his lips to hers, her hand in his hair and her skin on his fingertips, the stardust came to settle in the hollow chambers of their hearts.

———————————————

In the morning when she woke up, he was making omelets – or at least trying to – in the galley. It didn’t surprise her in the least when they both ended up poking at scrambled egg with weird bits of bacon and mushy vegetables mixed in.

“Your cooking is just as appalling as your driving,” she commented with a grin, trying to down the food with gulps of water. “How did you even survive college?”

“Mandatory meal plan,” he replied in between mouthfuls of egg, though it was clear he didn’t enjoy it either; engineers tended to view food as a subsistence, not as an indulgence.

Sighing, she started digging through the cupboards, and after fifteen minutes finally managed to put together a sandwich. She broke it in half and pushed one piece toward him.

He squinted at her, but she just rolled her eyes and munched on her half. As soon as he bit in, though, he couldn’t keep himself from devouring the whole thing. “What is this? Unicorn meat peppered with hopes and dreams?”

She chuckled heartily, leaning over to peck his cheek. “Prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella sandwich, with a hint of aioli,” she responded, and he looked like he had just heard the words of the good Lord. “From now on, whenever we’re not eating out, I’m in charge of kitchen duty. Have we got ourselves a deal?”

There was present in the air a subtle change, like before rain there was always a distinct smell of the earth and a shift in the wind, when he stalled for an answer and stared at the kitchen table. She shifted in her chair, wondering if what she said was out of bounds. The second dragged on silently like it would never end.

When he finally spoke, it was merely a whisper, “Jemma.” And she flinched at the sound of her own name. He took one deep breath before meeting her eyes, “Jemma, I dream about waking up to our limbs all tangled up, your messy hair in my face and my arms asleep from the weight of your head.”

She was complete caught off guard. The only thing she could sputter out was a breathless ‘what?’

He continued like he didn’t hear her, like if he stopped all the words bottled up would dissolve into his every fiber and he would have to forever hold them inside, “and maybe in another universe I can. Maybe in another universe there are no Hydras and paradoxes and there’s just you, and there’s me, and we don’t have the weight of the world on our shoulders. Maybe we’re backpackers with just the open road ahead and I’ll mess up your ramen and you’ll make me the world’s most dangerous sandwich. Maybe we’re scientists going around the world on a plane to protect people. There are many versions of reality, and it is reassuring to think in all of them we are companions on our endless journey.

“But this now, this here, is what the universe has given us. I belong in a black hole and you belong in rainy London with someone who looks at you like he’s staring into the heart of the Carina Nebula. You deserve so much more than a life in a box with a guy that’s already dead.”

She blinked at him. The emotion on his face was so raw she felt a sharp twinge in her heart. The spiteful words subsided, and she inhaled shakily, “we are on a time machine, Fitz. You can live out the rest of your life before returning to the exact time and place and end it with a bang. Time is in your hands.”

“That’s not how it works,” he rubbed his temples. “Besides, travelling constantly, running into danger and away from it, living in a different century every day, all in an effort to delay your inevitable death, that’s not a real life.”

“It is to me,” she deadpanned, leaning back on her chair to let him know the matter was final.

He stared at her, unblinking. “You really think so?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he sighed. He rubbed his face with both hands. When he looked up again, there was a manic grin in place of slightly downturn lips. He chirped, “onwards, upwards, Jemma Simmons! Pick a time and a place, and we’ll go there.”

Before she could react, he bounced to his feet and excused himself from the galley. She listened to his distant footsteps, her brain burning itself trying to process the situation. Nothing made sense and his words still ached but the taste of his kiss still lingered and goddamnit she felt like she was about to implode. She poured a glass of wine from the cupboard to clear her head.

The static hum of engines was replaced by a louder rotor sound of the TARDIS in flight. A few minutes later, he returned. He tilted his head while looking at her, and she was reminded for a moment just how young he actually was, standing there with flushed cheeks and curious wide eyes, in a crumpled t-shirt that he had gone to bed in. She couldn’t help but smile. She really did like him a lot.

In one swift movement, he brushed the hair on her neck back and pressed a feathery kiss behind one ear. “I have something for you,” he breathed against her bare skin. The timbre of his voice sparked every cell to life.

Gingerly, he clasped a locket around her neck. It clicked into place, the metal cool and solid in the center of her chest. He took a few steps back to fully look at her, and in that moment which seemed infinite, she felt like the Carina Nebula. “You are staggeringly beautiful,” he professed simply. And then, after a paused, he croaked, “I’m sorry.”

The locket started to beep. The TARDIS accelerated. What followed right after was just a whirlwind of flashing, tainted images: the four red numbers inside her locket counting down from five, a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen table, her hands fumbling to get the locket off, the mark she left last night on his collarbone, the familiar temporal switch on the side of this bloody locket. Her eyes flickered to him one last time, horror-stricken, and a single, lonesome tear blazed down his cheek.

The next thing she saw was Coulson and the team staring back at her.

————————————-

When Simmons returned without her vortex manipulator and practically begged for another trial, Stark and Banner just shook their heads in defeat. They couldn’t build another vortex manipulator from SHIELD’s depleted budget. Project Indigo was shut down the next day.

And so Simmons went on with her life. She filed a report, leaving out as much emotion as she could, and submitted it to Coulson. She went out for drinks on the weekend. She resumed her duty as a scientist to design a pathogen that could affect Hydra biology.

Except she knew a biological warfare couldn’t be won if biochemistry was without engineering. Individually, it worked fine, but this was the kind of thing that would be better with two.

 _Her life_ would be better with two.

Underneath button-up shirts and cardigans, she still wore his locket, even though it burned a ragged hole through her chest. Every object had its fair share of good and bad memories, and she deemed it the owner’s choice to remember which ones. To her, the locket meant gentle kisses and eyes of glass, and those were the things she chose to carry. Nothing more, nothing less.

It wasn’t until Skye caught it gleaming under the dim light of a bar that the weight she had been refusing to bear finally dragged her down into the depths of the ocean.

“Oh, let me guess, a guy gave it to you?” Skye ventured, wagging her glass in front of Simmons’ chest.

Simmons cursed the low-cut top she was wearing. It seemed selfish, but she wanted the story of him to be hers and hers alone to keep. So she just nodded and peered down her empty glass in silence. The red neon light casted grotesque shadows on half of her face.

“Can I…?” Skye hesitated, eyeing the locket. With Simmons’ permission, she ran her thumb across it, tracing the strange interwoven circular symbols inscribed on the surface. “It’s beautiful,” she sighed.

Her movement halted when she reached the side. “What is this?” questioned Skye. “It appears to be some sort of… switch.”

Her last word jolted Simmons, and for the first time since that day she allowed herself to look at the locket.

_It can’t be._

She gathered Skye into a tight hug, pressing her face against her friend’s denim-clad shoulder. “Thank you Skye. Thank you.”

Skye muttered something that sounded confused and vaguely offensive, but Simmons couldn’t hear her. She was already out the door.

——————————————

“Are you sure about this, Simmons?” Coulson frowned, tapping a pen against the files scattered on his desk, a habit in response to stress he’d acquired sometime after becoming Director of SHIELD. “Even if we somehow manage to salvage the tech from your locket, we only have enough resources to perform one more temporal jump.”

“Positive, sir.”

“What makes you think this trial will be different than the ones before?”

She squared her shoulders, “because I know him now. And I will not let him die. Not again.”

Coulson stopped tapping his pen and scrutinized her, his expression impassive. The radio on his desk crackled to life, and Commander May reported that Alaska had been lost to a wave of incoming Hydras. They stared at each other in silence, until he looked away from her and burrowed his face in his hands. When he spoke, it was not as Director Coulson of SHIELD, but as Phil Coulson, citizen of a lost planet, his voice shaky and quiet, “tell me, Simmons, what am I gonna do if we fail?”

“We won’t, sir,” she contested. “And if we do, well, the only thing I can tell you with certainty is that I don’t believe this darkness will endure.”

He smiled at her, a kind but wan smile, and she smiled back.

—————————————-

It took a month, but eventually Stark and Banner’s magic worked on the little vortex manipulator, and Project Indigo lived to see another trial.

When she materialized on the grating inside the TARDIS, it felt like rounding the corner to her street.

When she saw him sitting on the beat-up jump seat with his feet on the control panel, it felt like coming home.

But when he looked at her and didn’t see her, because to him this was their first meeting and she was just a stranger who had stumbled upon his ship, it felt like the house was empty and she was all alone.

She breathed slowly. _In. Out. In. Out._ She had practiced this a thousand times now. Everything was exactly like words on a report, voice on a log. Everything was just muscle memory. She just had to play her part and say her line.

This was all just a play for his sake, stringing him along for the next fourteen days until he got to the incomplete grand finale that SHIELD was determined to finish. This was all just a play.

Except to her, it wasn’t.

“What did you see, Agent Fitz? What did you see in the future that made you plunge into a black hole and bring Hydras to our universe?” Her voice cracked at all the wrong places. Her hand trembled when it held out the flash drive.

She really was a terrible liar.

——————————————-

“Can I ask you something, Simmons?” he nudged her timidly, while they were at that twenty-third century beach, and she hummed her response. “How many times have you lived through these past few days?”

“What?” Her voice shot up an octave.

“It’s just,” he scratched the back of his neck. “On our first day – well, my first day – you said you had watched me die over and over. And then there’s the ease of it all, the effortlessness with which you take in life on an alien planet, the grace of your movements when we run away from guards, the way we finish each other’s sentences. It makes me wonder, is all.”

She chewed on her bottom lip, contemplating whether to give him an answer. He waited to the harmony of waves and wind, then suddenly he said, “you know what? Don’t tell me.”

“You have such a fickle heart, Fitz,” chided she, but there was a certain air of relief in her exhale.

“It’s more fun that way,” he grinned, hair sticking up wildly like splintered sunbeams running loose at dusk, and god he was beautiful. “Besides, I don’t think it matters that much. You are here, I am here, we take a forever and shape it in our hands so it fits within the few days we have, and that’s all I care for. And when I die, I know in another timeline some lucky bastard that has my face and lives my life will get to spend _his_ few days with you. That’s not as good as shaping forever, but it’s comforting enough.”

He grazed a finger down her face, and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from kissing him too early.

——————————————-

When they finally made love that night beneath the Carina Nebula, it wasn’t as gentle as the first time. She charted purple and pink constellations on his neck, across his chest, like she was lost and he was the North Star. She left crescent moons on his shoulder and drew maps down his spine so she could always find her way back.

_Mine, mine, mine, all mine to keep._

The thought clouded her head, resolute and persistent, until he breathed her name against her neck, and she knew that they were both home.

He fell asleep with her head on his chest. She wore his t-shirt and listened to his heartbeat, but all she could hear was the ticking sound of her timer as the numbers fell slowly back to zero.

———————————————

The next morning was inevitable.

Still, as she felt his hand on her neck working the clasp of the locket, her heart writhed and clawed with a will that put Minotaur to shame. It was the beeping that led her out of the maze in her own chest.

Five.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Four.

“I know,” she replied.

Three.

He shed a single tear.

Two.

She was there to wipe it away.

One.

She fisted a hand through his hair and their lips clashed like the collision of stars. Angry and desperate and so, so petrified.

Zero.

——————————————

There was a pair of ocean eyes that held her own when she woke up on the cool monochrome tiles of mission control center.

There was a raging storm within.

“What have you _done_?” he grated.

The room waited for her to speak with baited breath, so quiet she could hear the blood pounding behind her ears. Her first instinct when placed under pressure was to babble. “Anyone who has physical contact with me when a temporal jump occurs is identified by the vortex manipulator as an extended part of my biology, and therefore will be telepo –”

_“What. have. you. done?”_

There was a sharp bite in his tone, but she did not cower. She would not cower for doing the right thing. “I’ve saved your life,” she answered simply.

He held his head in his hands, guttural noises lashing madly inside his throat. When he finally glanced up, it was with a darkness that was both vulnerable and dangerous. “Who are you to play God?” he spat. “Who are you to decide who lives and dies? Didn’t I tell you that mess with a fixed point in time and the reality would collapse? Didn’t I?”

“Don’t you _dare_ patronize me!” she growled, and he shrunk back, apologetic. Her expression softened. “Look around you, Fitz. Does this look like an imploded reality to you?”

So he did. From weapon blueprints on the wall to a grim and forlorn sky just past the jut of a special ops agent’s shoulder, everything was distinctly post-apocalyptic. And then there was her, still in his shirt, watching him expectantly. It was a dreamlike beauty, but it was real. The only word he could mutter was a dazed ‘how?’

“Your death isn’t a fixed point in time; the rip in the spacetime fabric is,” she explained. “When I pulled you back with me, you never did have the time to change course. The TARDIS was still heading straight for that black hole. The rip still happened. Hydras still invaded the planet.”

She stopped and her eyes came to rest on his astounded expression. “And you are still alive,” she finished. It almost sounded like a grace.

He sat there in stunned silence, lost and confused, and she let him. The seconds drudged by like blood pulsing beneath a bruise.

“What do I do now?” he asked at last.

“You dove into a black hole because you weren’t afraid of burning the old world down in hopes of seeing a new one rise from the ashes,” she mused. “World-building has to start somewhere, yeah?”

He looked at her. The flecks of silver in his eyes held a curious spark. “And a lab is as good as any,” he concluded.

She smiled and laced her fingers through his. All their tomorrows began now.


End file.
